


She Burns Like the Sun, and I Can't Look Away

by wonderfulwrites



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-31
Updated: 2010-01-31
Packaged: 2017-10-06 21:27:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/57933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wonderfulwrites/pseuds/wonderfulwrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor envies them for their ability to escape chains of past and future, to just be in the now, at that moment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	She Burns Like the Sun, and I Can't Look Away

**Author's Note:**

> Based on firefly_124's prompt: _9/Rose(/Jack?), something between "Boom Town" and "Bad Wolf," on the trip to/from dropping off the Slitheen egg._

"Budge over, Doctor," Rose says, tugging at the duvet pinned under his body. "I need to make the bed."

The Doctor scowls over the top of the book he had been reading successfully until Rose emerged from the bathroom in a cloud of steam and cloyingly sweet bathing products. "What are you doin' that for? It'll be a mess again as soon as Jack is done in the shower."

"Because I don't want to wake up freezing in the middle of the night because all of the bedding is on the floor again. Now, move so I can finish."

He gives her a dark look as he lifts one hip so she can pull the bedclothes from underneath him.

Rose gives him a glare that is very much like her mother's, and chillingly so. "You'll actually have to get up, you know."

The Doctor lets out an exasperated sigh and gets to his feet.

He crosses his arms and looms, his place in his book held with one finger. He glares, irritated by this show of domesticity, this human ritual that has always been such a mystery to him. He is accustomed to catching what little sleep he needs wherever he happens to be - in the console room, in the library, in a jail cell on Pertinax Prime, at tea with Queen Elizabeth III - but through hundreds of years and dozens of companions, he has learned that humans have all sorts of bedtime rituals, some of them quite elaborate, involving grooming and clothing, cups of cocoa, an hour or so in front of the telly, or as demonstrated at the moment by Rose, the careful arrangement of bedclothes.

She isn't the neatest companion he's ever had, his Rose, and is certainly giving Ace a run for her money in that department, but when it comes to making the bed, she's as meticulous as they come. She is oblivious to his exasperation, her movements efficient and purposeful as she tucks and tugs and smooths the bedding, turning back the duvet and the sheets into a neat, precisely folded line that is nearly mathematical in its evenness. The lamp on the bedside table gleams on her hair, creating the illusion that she is glowing like the divine twin goddesses of ancient Woman Wept, ignited by an internal and everlasting fire, and he really can't make sense of it, his sudden tolerance of domestics and fascination with these two humans and the reawakening of his once dormant libido.

Just then the bathroom door opens again, and Jack emerges, his only concession to decency a pair of pajama bottoms that ride down on his hips to reveal the enticingly sharp line of his pelvic bone

"Remind me never to take a holiday on Raxicoricofall-" A jaw-splitting yawn takes him in mid syllable. "-apatorius. I didn't think I'd ever get the smell of farts out of my hair." Jack throws himself on the freshly made bed, oblivious to the Jackie-like look Rose gives him. "I suppose no good deed goes unpunished."

Rose sighs in defeat. "Apparently not," she says and crawls over Jack to take her place in the center.

Jack slips an arm around her. "Something wrong, beautiful?"

Rose yawns and cuddles against him. "'M jus' tired, that's all."

The Doctor scoffs as he settles on the bed again. "You humans. Spend a few measly hours mucking about in a swamp, and all you can do is whine about how tired you are."

"We inferior species are barmy like that." Rose nuzzles against Jack. "Now, pull up the blankets, yeah?"

There's shifting and rolling, the bed plunging and rebounding as he and Jack get the duvet out from under their bodies and pull it up. The humans disappear beneath the duvet, and once they still, he finds his place in the book again and settles in for the night. He won't sleep, and in fact could be doing more interesting things than watching a couple of human drool and mumble all night, but Jack and Rose want him here, will hunt him down and drag him there if he doesn't at least stay for a little while. They crave his presence whether they are conscious or not, so he stays with them throughout the night, reading his way through the TARDIS library with more patience than he had known he possessed.

Tonight, though, he doesn't think he's going to get the chance read in peace. Even though they are still and quiet, even though he knows they are both beyond exhausted, there is a sense of building energy and the gradual accumulation of human pheromones. He begins to count, and exactly six minutes and seventeen seconds of silence pass before the bed clothing whispers as one of the humans shifts, the duvet sliding across their bodies but never revealing them. Rose giggles and whispers something to Jack; one shifts, the other moans softly, and Rose giggles again.

The Doctor sighs. "I'm trying to read here."

"Yeah?" Rose's head emerges from beneath the duvet, her hair mussed, her lips glistening and red and swollen. He wouldn't have known she was dead on her feet not seven minutes and forty eight seconds ago if he hadn't seen it himself. Nothing like endorphins and adrenaline to perk up a human. "Whatcha reading?"

The Doctor closes the book and reads the spine. "_Category Theory and the Reification of N-Dimensional Space As Applied to Space-Time and Quantum Gravity and Its Special Effects on M-Theory for the Layman._"

Rose's tongue peeks out of the corner of her mouth. "Was any of that in English?"

Jack pokes his head out of the duvet and rests his chin on Rose's shoulder. "It's boring physics stuff."

The Doctor gives Jack a skeptical look. "Boring? Didn't you wax lyrical about boring physics stuff just this morning when you were toying with the extrapolator?"

"Well, we weren't all in bed this morning."

"You apes and your endless sex drives," he says, but not without affection.

"Yes, and aren't we glad you have such impressive –" Jack frowns thoughtfully. "What did he call it, Rose?"

Rose's eyes flash as she grins. "Time Lord stamina and endurance?"

Jack clicks his fingers. "That's it. Time Lord stamina and endurance. So lucky for us you can deal with our endless sex drives."

With a sigh of long suffering, the Doctor turns to set the book on the bed side table and resigns himself to the fact that Jack is probably coaching Rose on the best way to ambush him.

And sure enough, he has no sooner turned back than he has a lapful of Rose Tyler, already stripped down to her knickers by Jack's deft hands. She catches his face in her hands and kisses him; her mouth is like fire against his cool lips, her tongue quick and demanding. He rests his hands on her hips, his senses filled with her smell of apples and soap, her complicated taste of salts and human hormones and mint toothpaste, her weight and heat. Then all at once, he's cast adrift; the solid, right here right now-ness of Rose falls away, and all he can feel is Time, bearing down on them. Timelines, long and intricate, twist around them, around Rose, showing him some distant future, a cold, empty beach with waves throwing up spray and icy wind whipping through her hair as she cries and the words Bad Wolf written in her every tear.

"Okay. That's enough, you two," says Jack, his voice slipping between them as effectively as his hand might have, and when Rose breaks the kiss, the timeline slithers away, leaving behind a patina of foreboding and unease.

"Jealous, Captain?" Rose tilts her head to grin at Jack, who is, unsurprisingly, completely naked and clearly eager for the proceedings to begin.

He flashes his even white teeth at her. "No, just feeling a bit left out, sweetheart. I thought the plan was to share."

The Doctor favors them with a look of mock indignation. "Oi, what am I, an ice lolly?"

Rose licks her lips, a wicked gleam in her eyes. "Well, we could pretend." She grabs the hem of his jumper. "But this needs to come off, first."

"I second that!" is Jack's enthusiastic cry.

The Doctor sits forward, lets her pull the jumper up and over his head, the collar snagging on one of his ears.

"Those are attached you know."

Rose just giggles at his complaint as she tears it free and sends it sailing into a far corner of the room before she attacks him with her mouth again.

"Rose." The Captain draws out her name in an exaggerated whine. "I thought we were going to share!"

The Doctor is given a momentary reprieve from Rose's assault as she favors Jack with her flirtatious tongue and teeth grin. "Well if you're going to be a little girl about it."

Jack just laughs. "Minx."

The Doctor merely rolls his eyes at Jack's ever worsening use of early twentieth century endearments.

Rose sighs forlornly and slides off of the Doctor. "I suppose I'll have to give you to Jack, now."

She quite literally passes him to Jack as if he is some kind of object – a brolly, a cuppa, a cricket ball – an he allows it, allows Jack's larger calloused hands to replace Rose's, allows his lips and even white teeth to assault his mouth, filling it with a taste of salts and genetically altered hormones. One of Jack's hands moves south, beneath the waist of his jeans. He pays the sort of attention to the Doctor that would have distracted even the most ascetic of Time Lords, but the timelines assault him again, and this time he sees Jack, older and weary, dirty and beaten, chained in the bowels of some hot place, machinery exhaling steam, the phrase Bad Wolf lurking in the twisting vapors.

First the cold beach, now this place of heat and agony.

He shivers between his two humans; they seem oblivious to his distraction. Rose is like a furnace against his back, an echo of the hot place he sees in Jack's future. Her bare chest presses against him, her hands ghosting across his shoulders, her mouth and tongue tracing along his spine, flickering across the tiny erogenous zones near his vertebrae. Jack's hands are working at him with the same skill and finesse of an artist, a stroke here, a swipe there, pressure applied in all the right places in all the right ways, as lost to the the biological imperative of sex as Rose is.

The Doctor envies them for their ability to escape chains of past and future, to just be in the now, at that moment, experiencing it without the pressure of what was or what will be, existing from one moment to the next in the bliss of hormone induced ignorance. He himself is lost, lost amongst all of the almosts and not-quites and never-evers and most-definitelys that drift on the horizon of the future, an array of infinite nows, all hinting at the dark somewhen beyond this moment of light.

He should leave them, he thinks suddenly. He should do it, right now, drop them off on Earth, run away and never look back. They'll do well together, Rose and Jack, better than they will with him, certainly, and maybe the dark timelines dancing around them won't come to pass. Maybe there will be a happily ever after with carpets and floors and mortgages, or a life of time travel with Jack's vortex manipulator, it doesn't matter; anything would be better for them than the cold beach and that place of heat and pain.

But the Doctor moans as Jack does something intricate and talented with his hands, and he knows he will never leave them. Rose giggles and slides her own hand over his hip to join Jack's; his breath catches as two pairs of hands now work at him, and Jack catches one of his earlobes between his teeth.

"Come back to us, Doc," he whispers against his ear. "It's a lot more interesting here."

Somewhere in their futures, there is an empty beach, the place of heat and pain, and the words Bad Wolf following them across the stars, but right now there are hands and lips and hormones, numbing the flow of time, reducing it to a singular, transitory moment.

And he goes back to them while he still can.


End file.
